Tomfoolery raises $1.7M for social enterprise app

The company gets support from heavy hitters, including Andreessen Horowitz and Jerry Yang

Enterprise software has been getting quite a bit of attention lately, particularly since HR platform Workday went public—and became one of the best performing tech stocks of 2012. A number of companies have been looking for ways to fuse enterprise software with another uber popular category: social media. So you have the Yammers and the Tibbrs who move in to fill the gap of finding an intuitive social platform for the workspace. They add on a mobile element after the fact for workers in the field, but now there’s a new company that’s coming out with a mobile-first solution.

Tomfoolery, founded by serial entrepreneur Sol Lipman and former Yahoo VP Kakul Srivastava, has created a social app for the workplace. The app is currently in stealth mode, but the company announced Wednesday that it has raised $1.7 million in a seed round led by Morado Ventures and Sam Pullara of Sutter Hill Ventures. Other participants in the round include Andreessen Horowitz, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, YouSendIt CEO Brad Garlinghouse, David Tisch of TechStars, and others.

While the company isn’t giving away many details about the app, co-founder and CTO Sol Lipman says that it is specifically designed for employees who work in teams.

“Everything we do is focused on mobile and teams,” said Lipman. “The mobile-first approach is key to our strategy and will greatly affect what the products do and how they are used. Culture hacking is our DNA and we have some guiding philosophies that will make teams more successful and work awesome(r).”

(The company’s motto is Work Awesome.)

Lipman tells me that the app will be usable across different industries, in any situation where employees will be working in teams. The company plans to unveil the app in Q1 2013.

“The opportunity for mobile to continue to disrupt the workplace is tremendous –Tomfoolery is poised to capitalize on this trend,” said Jerry Yang, in a statement. “We are excited about Tomfoolery because they’ve put together an amazing team to go after a big idea.”

Lipman says the company plans to use the new capital to make a few key hires. When asked where he sees the company in a year, Lipman says: “As a huge, evil corporation that has the 10th largest GDP in the world. Or...having some solid products in the market that are being used by tens of thousands of teams who, like us, want to make work awesome every single day.”